Canto VI. The poets disengage themselves from the large company of unshriven souls, all of whom beg of Dante that he seek prayers for them from their living friends and family. This leads Dante to ask Virgil to ask why Divine justice should respond to prayer in this matter. Dante and Virgil then meet the soul of Sordello, a Mantuan, which prompts Dante to a long diatribe on the state of Italy.

Virgil’s answer to Dante’s question on prayer provides matter for reflection here. On the face of it the political polemic that takes up most of the Canto does not. I think this mistaken, but will return to Dante’s political views later. Dante’s question to Virgil is ostensibly prompted by a passage in the Aenied where Aeneas visits Hades. A soul of a drowned sailor asks to cross the Styx but is refused, since his body is unburied, and he is told by the Sybil that he cannot hope to change the decrees of the gods by prayer. The question of why our prayer should ever be efficacious does not require this obscure classical prompt, of course.

Virgil offers a provisional answer, Beatrice will fully enlighten Dante later. Figuratively, reason defers to theology. But we learn some theology nonetheless. Prayer is a kind of substitution, an offering of love for another, and so its effectiveness is not a lessening of divine justice, but a satisfaction of it. This answer is enlightening, certainly to me. Prayer is not a matter of offering the Godhead advice on how to run the universe, it is primarily an offering of love to God, that God uses in unexpected ways. That this is possible is a miracle of grace, as Herbert McCabe puts it, our prayer is ultimately not ours but rather ‘our way of sharing in that communication between the Son and the Father’ which is his self-offering on the cross.